I've been using win8 and office 2013 on my workstation and while I don't think much of windows 8, office 2013 is not much different to 2010 with a different appearance and could have been a service pack or theme pack to get us used to the 365 look and feel.

Anyone who's used office 365 will understand what MS is trying to do, however its a little ahead of its time as not everyone wants to shunt everything off into the cloud, or should I call it the Azure.

Office 2013 does appear to play slightly better with Sharepoint though, and if you did call MS I'm sure they'll allow you a second activation if you call them, just like they have always done for windows.

networkn:I am about 80% sure, that being a MS reseller you are required to agree to accept returns on software which has not been installed because the end user doesn't accept the EULA, I believe you can also approach MS directly for that refund.

It's probably one of those situations where they will refuse the refund instore, and you have to contact their management for the refund, which is a hassle. Being a MS reseller they should have it in their terms that microsoft software is returnable if you don't agree to the EULA. Or they could give the person a copy of the EULA to read instore prior to purchase and agree to it before handing over their money. The thing is that the EULAs are so long and complex that most people don't read them, and if they do, they will take a long time to go through properly.

That's turning the GUI off completely and using command line (someithng I do on all my Linux servers) but in a windows server getting to the widgets such as Active Director, Server Manager, Exchange Manager, Temrinal session maangers etc requires a gui.

THe 2003 style gui allowed you to put shortcuts on the desktop (and lots of them, you didnt have to slide to the edge to get tool bars, start menu etc, control panel was easy to get to and there were less resources dedicated to running gui / widgets and animations.

2010 was a cool interface for adding search bar in the start menu (I had already hacked my path and added batch files in all my WinXP, Server 2003 Os to do this) but again added clicks for simple functions. Try geting to network connections to enable or disable as quickly is one example.

The new Os interface beimng Windows 8 style adds even more layers of crud such as sliding to a screen corner to get the start menu / bar up. Heck , before I just used tolook down ....